Protection of devices used to monitor rooms or areas, such as jail cells or lobbies, has been effected by either building a viewing port into a wall so the monitoring device may view the room or area through the viewing port, or by mounting the monitoring device outside the room so the monitoring device may view the room through gaps in a barrier, such as cell bars.
Building a viewing port into the wall of a room when the room is being constructed requires providing a tamper-resistant protective housing for the monitoring device outside of the room to be monitored. The associated monitoring device must be located inside the protective housing, which is behind the wall. Thus the monitoring device is unlikely to have a clear view of the entire room because room areas adjacent to the wall (through which the viewing port is mounted) tend to be behind the view of the monitoring device.
Refitting a viewing port into a constructed room includes the problem of making a hole of significant size in an existing room wall and fitting it with a viewing port. It also involves the task of finding a tamper-resistant secure place, outside of the monitored room, to mount the monitoring device.
The scheme of mounting the monitoring device outside the room, so it has a view of the inside of the room through gaps in a barrier, such as the bars of a cell, is often a viable alternative to use with rooms already constructed. Even so, the view of the room provided to the monitoring device is impaired as portions of a room most distant from the monitoring device tend to be occluded and inevitably blind spots occur both because of the barrier in front of the monitoring device and because the monitoring device is partially blocked by the wall in front of it.
In the cases noted above, the task of finding a place for the monitoring device may prove insurmountable as suitable places may not exist outside the room to be monitored. In the above cases, the monitoring device must be protected from tampering both from within and from without the monitored room, and thus the monitoring device must be mounted inside an armored, tamper-resistant housing with a transparent tamper-resistant viewing port. Because of the wide variety of places where such housings are to be placed, little standardization of housings is possible. At present, protection of monitoring devices, if a location to place a monitoring device can be found, requires substantial construction and results in limited performance.
The new corner-mounted shield overcomes the above limitations as:
it is straightforward to add during room construction or to add to already constructed rooms because it is pre-manufactured as a standard item and is placed in an available room corner using conventional fasteners;
it provides the monitoring device a view of the entire room because of the unobstructed view resulting from the viewing port facing into the room from a corner and because the internally located monitoring device is capable of being closer than an externally located monitoring device to the most distant part of the room; and
it is inherently resistive to tampering because the wall attaching fasteners are inaccessible and the window attaching fasteners are tamper resistant.